this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
95 points (99.0% liked)
Games
21342 readers
140 users here now
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
- No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or transphobia. Don't care if it's ironic don't post comments or content like that here.
- Mark spoilers
- No bad mouthing sonic games here
- No gamers allowed
- No squabbling or petty arguments here. Remember to disengage and respect others choice to do so when an argument gets too much
- Anti-Edelgard von Hresvelg trolling will result in an immediate ban from c/games and submitted to the site administrators for review.
- Can't read Colon Syntax Emoji? :skill-issue:
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, this makes me happy. I wad so frustrated to try so many demos this next fest just to find out they were made with AI.
I also don't fully get the AI placeholder artworks. I understand that there is value in quickly accessing an asset that fits the game, yet there are plenty royalty free textures, materials songs and sounds you can use nowadays. Why generate stuff that will get binned anyways?
That gets to something I've often thought. AI is like reinventing the wheel constantly. If there's 20 games using AI placeholders for a tree they'll generate 20 different placeholders. Like let's just say we are letting them use AI in this scenario. Why would you not simply use AI to generate placeholder textures for any object you could think of, and then publish those and everyone use the same ones? Generating new ones for every person is so insanely wasteful if all it needs to do is be a placeholder.
For my own game I'm using stuff from kenney.nl as placeholders, and the thing is I don't think anybody would rake me over the coals if some of those ended up in the final product - wheras if we take these companies at their word that AI keeps ending up in their games by accident then the risk of letting an AI asset into your process is massive. People really, really don't like to see it.
it takes time to go through library assets and presumably you can generate something more specific in one or two tries.
i'm grey box pilled so i don't care too much about placeholder textures and would never use gen ai for that, but on the other hand if you're showing your game to the public, everyone is a dumbass and will look at a pre-alpha and complain that it doesn't look like red dead
That is true, and there are also very specific things you might not find in a library. But then again promting an AI like ChatGPT was somewhat tedious as well, last time I tried well over a year ago. So I am not sure it works that much better, and with textures you may still have to to some tweaking in engine/ 3D software
Early in AI image generators, before the consensus developed, I made a game using AI for placeholders. It was faster than programmer art, and covered a wider range of stuff than royalty free art. It could've been a good workflow if the zeitgeist around AI image generation settled on "replacing AI images with real art is a new kind of job for a contract artist."
But the "advancement" in AI image gen has been laser-focused on replicating production-quality commercial art in a narrow range of the most common commercial styles (Warcraft, dark fantasy, anime waifu), the reification of the desires of creatively bankrupt rich people who want interchangeable cogs rather than art. People who would be better served by ripping the models from Warcraft, but can't because they respect copyright as much as they disrespect artists. It's absolutely tainted with a radioactive garbage ideology at this point, you can't just ask an artist to ignore that and replace it.
Or at least, they disrespect copyright indirectly.